The production of integrated circuits involves multiple processes. For example, semiconductor devices, bonding pads and other circuitry are fabricated on a semiconductor wafer (e.g., a silicon wafer). During a known portion of the processing, a wafer is sawn into individual dies (also known as “chips”) while mounted, such as by dicing tape, on a flexible wafer frame or flexframe. After the sawing operation, each wafer frame is fed through a wafer handler that includes a stretching operation that stretches the dicing tape substrate to assist in spacing the individual dies from each other prior to arriving at an operation that picks the dies off of the dicing tape.
Wafer handling equipment, such as known wafer handlers manufactured and sold by Kabushiki Kaisha Shinkawa, may be capable of accommodating wafers of different sizes and their corresponding wafer frames. For instance, 200 mm and 300 mm diameter wafer sizes on corresponding wafer frames of different sizes are accommodated by such wafer handlers. However, heretofore, considerable unproductive time was required for a machine operator to adapt a wafer handler to switch from handling one size wafer to another size wafer. Such adaptation required tedious and time consuming removal and reinsertion of approximately two dozen individual fasteners to change components or modify portions of the wafer handler.